Pages

Monday, May 19, 2014

As the
year 2000 approached, two of the main topics of conversation were: Could the
world's computers handle the switchover, the so-called Y2K problem, and when
did the 21st century actually begin, in 2000 or 2001?

Numerical
nitpicking aside, it is clear the 21st century began in 1991 with the collapse
of the Soviet Union. The political, ideological and military confrontation that
had defined the second half of the 20th century was done.

What's
taking its place is only gradually becoming evident. At first there was a sort
end-of-history euphoria in the West, the belief that people would devote
themselves to computers and consuming. That giddiness lasted a decade until
Sept. 11, 2001, when a new element of the 21st century made itself dramatically
known.

History
had returned — this time taking the form of anti-modernist Islamic terrorism,
the Koran and Kalashnikov versus the laptop and the mall. The resulting wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq changed warfare. Massed standing armies and nuclear
stockpiles were revealed as antiquated overkill. Drones, intel and special
forces were the new hot thing.

The
financial debacle of late 2007 was the next stroke in the 21st century's
emerging portrait. The crisis highlighted the vast disparity between the
superrich and everyone else.

A bank
may be too big to fail, but no homeowner is. All countries now have their own
version of the 1 percent — whether it is corrupt Chinese officials who have to
rent apartments to hold the cash bribes they have received, Russian oligarchs
buying Western sports teams like Chelsea or the Nets, or top U.S. hedge fund
managers who make a million dollars an hour when the minimum wage cannot make
it to $10.

The
Russian annexation of Crimea and the subsequent turmoil in Ukraine is another
key feature in the portrait. The process that had begun with the real beginning
of the 21st century in December 1991 had now come full circle. A Russia humiliated
by the Soviet failure and by the triumphalism of the West was now back with a
vengeance. With the $50 billion Olympics behind it, the Russia of 2014 was not
about to allow a failing Ukraine slip into the Western camp. That would mean
Russia would be outflanked by NATO from the Baltic to the Black Sea which
itself would become a sort of Lake NATO.

Russia
was immediately criticized for not acting in a 21st-century fashion — that is,
modern, rational and civilized. But it was the West that was deluded with
fantasies of order and decorum when perceived vital interests were being
threatened. As Robert D. Kaplan, chief geopolitical analyst for Stratfor, put
it with blunt concision: "In geopolitics, the past never dies, and there
is no modern world."

The
countries of Eastern Europe were less surprised, remembering all too well that
it was in Yalta, Crimea that they were sold out by the "Big Three" in
1945.

The
most important immediate effect of the Ukrainian crisis is that Russia and the
West have called it quits. The West has rejected Russia for rejecting Western
ways. Russia is now pivoting east toward Central Asia and China — and north to
the riches of the Arctic. Russia has sheared off from the West like one of
those glacial ice masses whose melting will no doubt flood coastal cities
worldwide as the 21st century ends, completing its portrait.

Before that
happens, though, there will be other defining strokes. Some may come soon near
specks of islands for which the Japanese have one name and the Chinese quite
another.

This
isn’t what the 21st century was supposed to look like. The visceral reaction of
many pundits, academics and Obama Administration officials to Russian President
Vladimir Putin’s virtual annexation of Crimea has been disbelief bordering on
disorientation. As Secretary of State John Kerry said, “It’s really 19th
century behavior in the 21st century.” Well, the “19th century,” as Kerry calls
it, lives on and always will. Forget about the world being flat. Forget
technology as the great democratizer. Forget the niceties of international law.
Territory and the bonds of blood that go with it are central to what makes us
human.

Geography
hasn’t gone away. The global elite–leading academics, intellectuals, foreign
policy analysts, foundation heads and corporate power brokers, as well as many
Western leaders–may largely have forgotten about it. But what we’re witnessing
now is geography’s revenge: in the East-West struggle for control of the buffer
state of Ukraine, in the post–Arab Spring fracturing of artificial Middle
Eastern states into ethnic and sectarian fiefs and in the unprecedented arms
race being undertaken by East Asian states as they dispute potentially
resource-rich waters. Technology hasn’t negated geography; it has only made it
more precious and claustrophobic.

Whereas
the West has come to think about international relations in terms of laws and
multinational agreements, most of the rest of the world still thinks in terms
of deserts, mountain ranges, all-weather ports and tracts of land and water.
The world is back to the maps of elementary school as a starting point for an
understanding of history, culture, religion and ethnicity–not to mention power
struggles over trade routes and natural resources.

The
post–Cold War era was supposed to be about economics, interdependence and
universal values trumping the instincts of nationalism and nationalism’s
related obsession with the domination of geographic space. But Putin’s actions
betray a singular truth, one that the U.S. should remember as it looks outward
and around the globe: international relations are still about who can do what
to whom.

Putin’s Power Play

So what
has Putin done? The Russian leader has used geography to his advantage. He has
acted, in other words, according to geopolitics, the battle for space and power
played out in a geographical setting–a concept that has not changed since
antiquity (and yet one to which many Western diplomats and academics have
lately seemed deaf).

Europe’s
modern era is supposed to be about the European Union triumphing over the bonds
of blood and ethnicity, building a system of laws from Iberia to the Black
Sea–and eventually from Lisbon to Moscow. But the E.U.’s long financial crisis
has weakened its political influence in Central and Eastern Europe. And while
its democratic ideals have been appealing to many in Ukraine, the dictates of
geography make it nearly impossible for that nation to reorient itself entirely
toward the West.

Russia
is still big, and Russia is still autocratic–after all, it remains a sprawling
and insecure land power that has enjoyed no cartographic impediments to
invasion from French, Germans, Swedes, Lithuanians and Poles over the course of
its history. The southern Crimean Peninsula is still heavily ethnic Russian,
and it is the home of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, providing Russia’s only outlet
to the Mediterranean.

Seeing
that he could no longer control Ukraine by manipulating its democracy through
President Viktor Yanukovych’s neo-czardom, Putin opted for a more direct and
mechanical approach. He took de facto control of pro-Russian Crimea, which for
all intents and purposes was already within his sphere of influence. Besides,
the home of Russia’s warm-water fleet could never be allowed to fall under the
sway of a pro-Western government in Kiev.

Next,
Putin ordered military maneuvers in the part of Russia adjoining eastern
Ukraine, involving more than 10,000 troops, in order to demonstrate Russia’s
geographical supremacy over the half of Ukraine that is pro-Russian as well as
the part of Ukraine blessed with large shale-gas reserves. Putin knows–as does
the West–that a flat topography along the long border between Russia and
Ukraine grants Moscow an overwhelming advantage not only militarily but also in
terms of disrupting trade and energy flows to Kiev. While Ukraine has natural
gas of its own, it relies on Russia’s far vaster reserves to fuel its domestic
economy.

Putin
is not likely to invade eastern Ukraine in a conventional way. In order to
exercise dominance, he doesn’t need to. Instead he will send in secessionists,
instigate disturbances, probe the frontier with Russian troops and in other
ways use the porous border with Ukraine to undermine both eastern Ukraine’s
sovereignty and its links to western Ukraine.

In
short, he will use every geographical and linguistic advantage to weaken
Ukraine as a state. Ukraine is simply located too far east, and is too spatially
exposed to Russia, for it ever to be in the interests of any government in
Moscow–democratic or not–to allow Ukraine’s complete alignment with the
West.

Back to a Zero-Sum Middle East

Another
way to describe what is going on around the world now is old-fashioned zero-sum
power politics. It is easy to forget that many Western policymakers and
thinkers have grown up in conditions of unprecedented security and prosperity,
and they have been intellectually formed by the post–Cold War world, in which
it was widely believed that a new set of coolly rational rules would drive
foreign policy. But leaders beyond America and Europe tend to be highly
territorial in their thinking. For them, international relations are a struggle
for survival. As a result, Western leaders often think in universal terms,
while rulers in places like Russia, the Middle East and East Asia think in
narrower terms: those that provide advantage to their nations or their ethnic
groups only.

We can
see this disconnect in the Middle East, which is unraveling in ways that would
be familiar to a 19th century geographer but less intuitive to a Washington
policy wonk. The Arab Spring was hailed for months as the birth pangs of a new
kind of regional democracy. It quickly became a crisis in central authority,
producing not democracy but religious war in Syria, chaos in Yemen and Libya
and renewed dictatorship in Egypt as a popular reaction to incipient chaos and
Islamic extremism. Tunisia, seen by some as the lone success story of the Arab
Spring, is a mere fledgling democracy with land borders it can no longer
adequately control, especially in the southern desert areas where its frontiers
meet those of Algeria and Libya–a situation aggravated by Libya’s collapse.

Meanwhile,
Tripoli is no longer the capital of Libya but instead the central dispatch
point for negotiations among tribes, militias and gangs for control of
territory. Damascus is not the capital of Syria but only that of Syria’s most
powerful warlord, Bashar Assad. Baghdad totters on as the capital of a
tribalized Shi’ite Mesopotamia dominated by adjacent Iran–with a virtually
independent Kurdish entity to its mountainous north and a jihadist Sunnistan to
its west, the latter of which has joined a chaotic void populated by literally
hundreds of war bands extending deep across a flat desert terrain into Syria as
far as the Mediterranean.

Hovering
above this devolution of Middle Eastern states into anarchic warlorddoms is the
epic geographic struggle between a great Shi’ite state occupying the Iranian
Plateau and a medieval-style Sunni monarchy occupying much of the Arabian
Peninsula. The interminable violence and repression in eastern Saudi Arabia,
Bahrain and Sunnistan (covering both western Iraq and Syria) are fueled by this
Saudi-Iranian proxy war. Because Iran is developing the technological and
scientific base with which to assemble nuclear weapons, Israel finds itself in
a de facto alliance with Saudi Arabia. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu can be defined by his zero-sum geographic fears, including that of
the tyranny of distance: the difficulty of his relatively small air force to
travel a thousand miles eastward, which bedevils his search for an acceptable
military option against Iran. This helps make him what he is: an obstinate
negotiating partner for both the Palestinians and the Americans.

Pacific Projection

Then
there is the most important part of the world for the U.S., the part with two
of the three largest economies (China and Japan) and the home of critical
American treaty allies: the Asia-Pacific region. This region too is undeniably
far less stable now than at the start of the 21st century, and for reasons that
can best be explained by geography.

In the
early Cold War decades, Asian countries were preoccupied with their internal
affairs. China, under Mao Zedong’s depredations and Deng Xiaoping’s economic
reforms, was inwardly focused. Vietnam, the current territory of Malaysia and
to a lesser extent the Philippines were overwhelmed by internal wars and
rebellions. Singapore was building a viable city-state from scratch. And South
Korea and Japan were recovering from major wars.

Now
these states have consolidated their domestic affairs and built strong
institutions. They have all, with the exception of the poverty-racked
Philippines, benefited from many years of capitalist-style growth. But strong
institutions and capitalist prosperity lead to military ambitions, and so all
of these states since the 1990s have been enlarging or modernizing their navies
and air forces–a staggering military buildup to which the American media have
paid relatively scant attention.

Since
the 1990s, Asia’s share of military imports has risen from 15% to 41% of the
world total, and its overall military spending has risen from 11% to 20% of all
global military expenditures. And what are these countries doing with all of
these new submarines, warships, fighter jets, ballistic missiles and
cyberwarfare capabilities? They are contesting with one another lines on the
map in the blue water of the South China and East China seas: Who controls what
island, atoll or other geographical feature above or below water–for reserves
of oil and natural gas might lie nearby? Nationalism, especially that based on
race and ethnicity, fired up by territorial claims, may be frowned upon in the
modern West, but it is alive and well throughout prosperous East Asia.

Notice
that all these disputes are, once again, not about ideas or economics or
politics even but rather about territory. The various claims between China and
Japan in the East China Sea, and between China and all the other pleaders in
the South China Sea (principally Vietnam and the Philippines), are so complex
that while theoretically solvable through negotiation, they are more likely to
be held in check by a stable balance-of-power system agreed to by the U.S. and
Chinese navies and air forces. The 21st century map of the Pacific Basin,
clogged as it is with warships, is like a map of conflict-prone Europe from
previous centuries. Though war may ultimately be avoided in East Asia, the
Pacific will show us a more anxious, complicated world order, explained best by
such familiar factors as physical terrain, clashing peoples, natural resources
and contested trade routes.

India
and China, because of the high wall of the Himalayas, have developed for most
of history as two great world civilizations having relatively little to do with
each other. But the collapse of distance in the past 50 years has turned them
into strategic competitors in the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. (This
is how technology abets rather than alleviates conflict.) And if Narendra Modi
of the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party is elected by a significant
majority in elections in April and May, as is expected by many, India will
likely pursue a fiercely geopolitical foreign policy, aligning even more
strongly with Japan against China.

China,
meanwhile, faces profound economic troubles in the coming years. The upshot
will be more regime-stoked nationalism directed at the territorial disputes in
the South China and East China seas and more rebellions at home from regionally
based ethnic groups such as the Turkic Muslim Uighurs, in the west abutting
Central Asia, and the Tibetans, in the southwest close to India. Can the Han
Chinese, who inhabit the arable cradle of China and make up 90% of the
country’s population, keep the minorities on the upland peripheries under
control during a sustained period of economic and social unrest? The great
existential question about China’s future is about control of its borderlands,
not its currency.

Practically
anywhere you look around the globe, geography confounds. Burma is slowly being
liberated from benighted military dictatorship only to see its Muslim minority
Rohingyas suffer murder and rape at the hands of Burmese nationalist groups.
The decline of authoritarianism in Burma reveals a country undermined by
geographically based ethnic groups with their own armies and militias.
Similarly, sub-Saharan African economies have been growing dramatically as
middle classes emerge across that continent. Yet at the same time, absolute
population growth and resource scarcity have aggravated ethnic and religious
conflicts over territory, as in the adjoining Central African Republic and
South Sudan in the heart of the continent, which have dissolved into religious
and tribal war.

What’s New Is Old Again

Of
course, civil society of the kind Western elites pine for is the only answer
for most of these problems. The rule of law, combined with decentralization in
the cases of sprawling countries such as Russia and Burma, alone can provide
for stability–as it has over the centuries in Europe and the Americas. But
working toward that goal requires undiluted realism about the unpleasant facts
on the ground.

To live
in a world where geography is respected and not ignored is to understand the
constraints under which political leaders labor. Many obstacles simply cannot
be overcome. That is why the greatest statesmen work near the edges of what is
possible. Geography establishes the broad parameters–only within its bounds
does human agency have a chance to succeed.

Thus,
Ukraine can become a prosperous civil society, but because of its location it
will always require a strong and stable relationship with Russia. The Arab
world can eventually stabilize, but Western militaries cannot set complex and
highly populous Islamic societies to rights except at great cost to themselves.
East Asia can avoid war but only by working with the forces of ethnic
nationalism at play there.

If
there is good news here, it is that most of the borders that are being
redrawn–or just reunderlined–exist within states rather than between them. A
profound level of upheaval is occurring that, in many cases, precludes military
intervention. The vast human cataclysms of the 20th century will not likely
repeat themselves. But the worldwide civil society that the elites thought they
could engineer is a chimera. The geographical forces at work will not be easily
tamed.

While
our foreign policy must be morally based, the analysis behind it must be
cold-blooded, with geography as its starting point. In geopolitics, the past
never dies and there is no modern world.

Nakba week is over. The
demonstrators have gone home. The Palestinian Authority have delivered their
speeches and sounded their sirens. The Arab and “liberal” western press and
media have duly commiserated.

But
while Palestinians marked the 66th anniversary of the “catastrophic” mass
flight of Arab refugees from Israel in 1948, the French historian Georges
Bensoussan, on a visit to London, was focusing on a different nakba. He was asking a packed audience the rhetorical question: why do people, even when
presented with incontrovertible proof, persist in their denial of the mass
post-war exodus of Jews?

It was
at the height of the second intifada in 2002, when two Jews a day were being
beaten up on the streets of France, that Bensoussan decided to write about Jews
from Arab countries. The antisemitism sweeping France then, as now, was being
blamed on the Arab-Israel conflict. But Bensoussan, who left Morocco with his
family as a six-year-old, had a nagging feeling that the problem had deeper
root-causes.

The
condition of Jews in Arab lands is not one of harmonious coexistence between
Jews and Arab, shattered by the arrival of Zionism. Nor is it purely a
lachrymose tale of woe. Yes, Iraqi Jews experienced the Farhud pogrom in 1941 – but next to the Ukraine, Iraq was paradise,
Bensoussan contended. For 14 centuries, however, Jewish-Arab coexistence was
laced with contempt: Muslims kept their non-Muslim minorities in a state of
degradation and humiliation as dhimmis.
Dhimmitude was most rigorously applied those parts of the Muslim world most
remote from Ottoman influence – Yemen, Morocco, and Shi’a Iran. With western
colonisation, the Arab world lashed out at its minorities. The word “fear”
keeps cropping up in the archives in association with the Jews.

Jews
were not uprooted from their 2,500-year existence in Arab countries by a few
Zionist emissaries. Nor did their exodus begin after WW2. Jews were already
leaving Morocco in the 19th century to found communities in Portugal, Brazil
and Venezuela. Jews migrated from Iraq to India and China. (On the other hand,
the Jewish population increased in Egypt).

Bensoussan
traces the fault-line between Jews and their Arab neighbours to the onset of
19th century modernity and emancipation. The anti-Zionist Alliance Israelite Universelle schools network, paradoxically, “created a Jewish people and
prepared it for Zionism.”

Whereas
Ashkenazim chose between Judaism and secular Zionism, Sephardi/ Mizrahi Jews
saw a continuity between the two, in spite of the initial weakness of the
Zionist movement in Arab countries. But from 1929, Zionism also made Jews in
Arab countries vulnerable to the repercussions of the conflict in Palestine.
After 1948, Jewish communities were held hostage by Arab states.

Another
cause of the mass exodus was the blood-and-soil nationalism which prevented
Jews from becoming accepted as citizens of independent Arab states. The Arab
world eagerly embraced Fascist youth movements and Black Shirts; the influence
of the pro-Nazi sympathies of the Mufti of Jerusalem is well-known. His
virulent radio propaganda broadcasts spread anti-Jewish hatred. And the Mufti
was not the only pro-Nazi Arab leader.

But the
key reason for the Jewish Nakba – not
the only one but an essential factor – was a matter not of historical fact but
deep-seated cultural mentality.

As dhimmis, Jews were despised as half-persons.
They were feminised in the Muslim imagination. Like women, they were not
allowed to carry daggers. Like women, they had to ride side-saddle.

“The
more I studied the question, the more I understood that there was no solution
to the Arab-Israeli conflict,” said Georges Bensoussan.

The
truth is that the colonised can also be a coloniser, the victim of racism can
himself be a racist, and the martyr an executioner.

Like
intellectuals blinded to the Soviet regime’s crimes, people today cannot see
the truth before their very eyes. There’s a Chinese proverb that says, “When
the sage points at the moon, the fool looks at the finger.”

Only once the Palestinians recognize that
wars and terrorism that they initiated are the root cause of their own
suffering and the suffering of others will become possible to arrive at a true
peace in the Middle East.

The
Nakba is a bald-faced lie. No matter how many demonstrations are held in Israel
and other parts of the world, no matter how many PLO flags are hoisted, no
matter how many Israel Defense Forces soldiers are assaulted by rioters, it
still remains a lie. The proof for all to see is the date that the Nakba
demonstrators have chosen to mark the day − May 15. That is the day on which
the armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq invaded Israel with the
intention of destroying the nascent Jewish State.

More
than the Arab rejection of the November 1947 United Nations resolution on the
establishment of a Jewish and an Arab state in Palestine, more than the attack
by Arab bands against Jews and Jewish settlements in Palestine that followed
immediately upon the passage of the UN resolution, the combined attack of the
regular Arab armies on that day − the day on which British rule in Palestine
came to an end and Israeli independence was declared − proves beyond doubt that
the Nakba, “the Catastrophe,” is a catastrophe that the Arabs brought upon
themselves.

With
all the sympathy that we can and should muster for the suffering of hundreds of
thousands of Arabs in Palestine that resulted from the mistakes made by their
leaders and the leaders of the Arab world, mistakes which the local Arab
population supported without dissent, those who argue that we in Israel should
recognize the Nakba, or even teach it in our schools, are lending a hand to
perpetuating a lie and engage in Soviet-style manipulation of history.

George
Orwell wrote in his dystopian novel 1984:
“those who control the past control the future.” Make no mistake about it,
those who perpetuate the Nakba lie are making an attempt to control the future
by manipulating the past.

The
Palestinian Arabs are not the only Arabs who have suffered as a result of their
leaders’ mistakes. Just look at Syria, where the number of casualties and
refugees by now exceeds by far the plight of the Palestinian Arabs. Recognition
of these mistakes and their tragic consequences is an essential condition for
turning a new page to a life of progress and peace.

Germans
and Japanese, nations that were devastated by war initiated by their leaders,
well understand that they themselves are the guilty ones, not only for the
crimes they committed against those they considered to be their enemies, but
also for the tragedies that they themselves suffered as a result. Victory in
Europe Day, May 8, is not commemorated in Germany as the day of the German
catastrophe, and Victory in Japan Day, August 15, is not commemorated in Japan
as the day of the Japanese catastrophe. The Palestinians can take a lesson
here.

But far
more importantly, the recognition by the people of Germany and the people of
Japan of their guilt for their own suffering and the suffering of others paved
the way to peaceful relations with their former enemies. Peace could not have
been achieved without it. The same is true for the Palestinians and the rest of
the Arab World. It is only once they recognize that wars and terrorism that
they initiated are the root cause of their own suffering and the suffering of
others that it will become possible to arrive at a true peace in the Middle
East.

The
annual Nakba demonstrations are a clear indication that they still have a long
way to go before they reach that point. Those who lend their support to the
false Nakba narrative of history simply assist in laying obstacles on the path
to peace in the Middle East. The Nakba is a lie and peace will not be built on
a lie.

Last
week, the Anti-Defamation League issued a global report in which it compared
levels of anti-Semitism among adults in various places around the world.

It
seems that the place with the highest level of anti-Semitism is the Palestinian Authority, where 93% of adults hold anti-Semitic views. This is the result of
the Palestinian Authority’s unceasing incitement, which distorts the image of
the State of Israel and the Jewish People, as we have known in other places in
our past. This finds expression in the fact that they hold parades to
commemorate what they call the Nakba. They define the existence and
establishment of the State of Israel as a disaster that must be corrected. This
also finds expression in the increased activity that the Palestinians are
allowing in Judea and Samaria for Hamas, which directly and openly calls for
our destruction. Whoever sees the establishment of the State of Israel and its
continued existence as a disaster does not want peace.